My AI Project
October 15, 2026
AI has changed software engineering completely.
I got my start as a software engineer in high school, and I've been doing it ever since. I love it. I've spent my whole career in user interfaces. Today I'd recommend an AI assistant in almost every interface I can think of, and I use AI tools to create and manage my own code projects. A computer program, an app, whatever you want to call it, is hundreds of thousands of files of just words and code. That used to mean a project of that size needed a team and a lot of patience. AI tools changed the math. They let me build projects more ambitious than I ever could have attempted before, at a fraction of the time and cost.
Constant change
At first I figured I'd use other companies' AI tools for the rest of my career. Cursor was my favorite. But the changes to features, pricing, policy, and availability were constant for every AI product I tried. Even once I learned to love one, I couldn't consistently use it. Even when it worked, its price changed overnight.
It stopped being fun. Over the course of a single 24-month project I switched providers four times, and switched tools almost as many times. Each switch cost me a workflow I'd spent weeks building. I'd get comfortable with something, and then it would change out from under me. I wanted a legacy AI tool.
What "legacy" means
I mean it the way a record player is legacy. It doesn't get a software update that changes how it works. It doesn't cost more next month. You buy it once, you learn it once, and it works the same way for the rest of your life. The best tools in my home are the ones that work exactly the way they did when I mastered them.
That's what I wanted in software: something durable enough to build a skill on. Something I could master and learn to love, and something that would still be there, working the same way, for the people who depend on me.
The cutting edge was plenty powerful enough for me, but it wasn't comfortable enough to use every day, and it wasn't reliable enough for the people who depend on me.
So I built Bronco
Bronco is an AI agent that runs as a desktop app on your Mac, built for Apple Silicon. There's no server on my side to call. The model, the tools, everything runs on your hardware, so nothing you give it ever has to leave your machine. It reads PDFs, looks at an image and tells you what's in it, and handles general computing work. It runs long tasks on its own. And it does all of it inside a sandboxed virtual machine, so when it works on your behalf it works in a place that can't touch the rest of your system.
It comes with its own web browser, which it drives the way you would: it types, reads, and brings back what it finds. And it has a knowledge base that searches your documents two ways at once, full-text and vector, so the answers it gives you are grounded in your own files rather than whatever the model happened to memorize.
You download it once. Bronco isn't a service you subscribe to or a trend you follow; it's a tool you own outright.